


Greg Lestrade Draws

by MyRubicon



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Greg Lestrade-centric, Mystrade Mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 21:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16941153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyRubicon/pseuds/MyRubicon
Summary: Greg Lestrade draws. He always has.A character study.





	Greg Lestrade Draws

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a Christmas story; this is what happened instead. This piece is mainly about Greg Lestrade, his persistence and his resiliency with just a touch of Mystrade in the end. It's a quiet, unspectacular piece and, for me, a bit experimental. Comments invited.

Greg Lestrade draws. He always has.

As a child, his mother didn't really appreciate his creativity, but she can be forgiven for that because she was an overworked, careworn woman who had neither the time nor the money to paint over a small boy's colourful but clumsy wall decorations.

 

When he grew older, Greg's primary school teacher remarked on his creativity and sensitivity. That afternoon, he got involved in his first brawl, and although he came home with a shiner and a split lip, he'd given as good as he got. In an example of the strange workings of male minds all around the globe, the four boys became inseparable after that for the next couple of years. Greg learned that as long as he was tough enough, he could still draw as much as he liked. And he did like it a lot, because it settled his thoughts.

His teachers became resigned to his homework bearing doodles in the margins, because nothing they said or did made him stop. He joined the footie team, and later ruggers, and proved that he was very much an adolescent male capable of all the violence occasionally required in the East End, but only when he had to. His friends were used to his drawing and even had the odd picture or caricature of his decorating their bedroom walls.

 

When Greg's parents rowed, loudly and sometimes violently, the boy found an outlet in his art, although he would have taken exception to anyone calling his drawings that. He just continued doing what he liked. His still lives had no flowers in them but rugby balls and empty cider or beer bottles. Not that he, again, would have called them still lives or would have even been aware of the term.

His mother continued buying him paper and pencils even when money was a problem after his father had walked out. Greg paid her back by taking odd jobs as soon as he was old enough and taking charge of Tom, his younger brother who had started going around with the wrong sort of crowd.

It was a difficult time for them all, and some of the pictures he drew, ugly, spiteful, violent pictures, he burned before anyone could see them.

Then his mother got a better job, and they moved to a better area, and Greg had more room to rebel and become a punk and listen to The Clash and all that. He had his first girlfriend and several clandestine but fun encounters with men. And still he drew. On occasion he would even make a bit of money with the odd portrait of a tourist, but he didn't exactly look all that trust-inspiring with his safety pin earring, leather jacket, artfully ripped clothes and spiky hair, so that was a rare day.

 

Greg was talented, and in different life, he would have become an art student; in a really different life, he might have even studied Fine Art at Oxford. Applying as a police officer, however, was a logical choice for a young man who had to make money immediately out of school to help out his family and didn't want to become a career criminal. As a student officer, he still drew, sometimes even during work. Some of his instructors considered it disrespectful, but Greg maintained that it helped him think. And since he was bright and ready to put in more than the simply necessary work, the occasional doodle in the margins was, again, tolerated. Among his fellow student officers, his caricatures became quite popular. That he was also very good at hand-to-hand combat lessons didn't hurt, though. And he kept drawing.

 

As a Police Constable, Greg quickly found his way to the Criminal Investigative Department (CID). The police, it turned out, suited him perfectly, and he cheerfully embarked on his career. Sometimes he missed his rebellious time; his brief but fun encounters with other young men were necessarily a thing of the past now that he was a representative of the law. Society was still restrictive where sexual orientation was concerned, and the Yard was even more so. By way of compensation for the loss of his freedom, he bought himself a motorcycle. As long as he went drinking with his colleagues on occasion, they didn't mind that he spent some of his free time at the Tate Gallery or at the V&A. And still he drew.

 

At one time, Greg did actually spend seven weeks as an art student during an undercover mission. He was still young enough to easily pass for one, and the only one in his department with the requisite talent and skill. Those seven weeks opened up a new world for him, and Greg almost regretted returning to his regular police duty – but only almost. The many museums and galleries, large and small, of London were still available to him, and if he spent much more time there than before, it was no-one's business but his. Greg did decide to take a few art classes after hours, too, and branched out into oil for a while. Watercolours, while expressive in their own way, were too delicate and subtle for his taste. Inevitably, though, he returned to drawing, although he now didn't only draw in pencil any more but had added charcoal and pastels to his repertoire. At work it was still the pencil or the odd Biro when he was on the phone. Greg had always maintained that drawing helped him think, and this became even more pronounced the older he grew. It was his mind's way of manifesting all the small, subconscious things he had picked up on and give them shape and form, objects or impression or the odd expression of face or body language. His talent was to throw them on paper almost off-handedly, with few but unerringly precise lines.

 

Then Greg fell in love with Claire. She was a young teacher he'd met at an art exhibit, and within a year, they were married. During the time they first fell in love, most of his drawings were of her, her eyes, the light on her hair, the graceful slope of her neck. During that time, his work suffered a bit, but they were happy. And still he drew, although mostly pastels of his young wife in different situations and different light. Luckily, she was flattered and enjoyed her role as his muse.

It was Claire who firmly encouraged him to advance his career from Detective Sergeant to Detective Inspector. That meant longer hours and less time for museums or sittings or even just the two of them.

Discontent crept in on both sides, and Greg returned to charcoal and his trusty pencils and the odd office Biro. Before the two of them had even consciously noticed that a rift was growing between them, his drawings already told the story, if he had only known to look. But his time was increasingly rare these days. Greg did his job, and he did it very well. Claire accepted the pleasantly full bank account instead of his presence, and they slowly drifted apart. Through it all, whenever Greg found a little time, he drew.

 

After Greg had met Sherlock, convinced him to stay clean and consulted him on cases, he was often asked how he could bear the arrogant git. The thing was, in a way, he understood the mad bastard. Sherlock's genius brain worked differently from everything Greg knew and could imagine, of course, but there was a small place where the two of them overlapped. Sherlock was a brilliant observer, and he filed every tiny detail away in his nearly eidetic memory. Through his drawing – he still wouldn't have called it art – Greg was a rather good observer himself, and sometimes he observed more than he knew. Sherlock aligned all those facts in brilliant chains of logical conclusion. Greg worked with what he had consciously observed and subconsciously retained, and his process could be more accurately be labelled as intuition. Just as the lanky git had his little “oh!” moments of inspiration or illumination, Greg sometimes felt something similar, though probably weaker and certainly less reliable, when he looked at what his hand had drawn while he had been on the phone or in a meeting. Suddenly, certain details would align and jump out at him, and it was only a matter of finding the evidence to match his gut feeling. Sherlock's help was so invaluable to him because his reasoning was both more reliable and more structured than Greg's intuition, and Greg was never one to cut off his nose to spite his face. Yes, Sherlock was annoying at times, crude, callous and conceited, but he delivered results that led to convictions, and in the end, that was what counted. Also, for all that the consulting detective liked to pretend to be all about logic and deduction, he had an artistic streak himself that manifested when he played – played, not tortured – his violin. Sally Donovan only saw an inhuman freak in the man. Greg saw a gifted, though at times terribly annoying, person who had quite a bit in common with him. Both of them wanted to apprehend criminals; both were not above bending the rules and honouring the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Yet both of them were, each in their own way, honest and incorruptible. Both saw the world as it was but also as it could be, its likeness depicted, sometimes transcended by certain media like a horsehair bow on violin strings or graphite on paper. Sherlock blew in and out of the Yard's investigations like a whirlwind in an expensive coat and Mycroft Holmes became a subtle though noticeable power in the background while Greg proceeded with his work in his own steady, grounded way. His career advanced, his marriage went down the drain. And all that time, he still drew. If his drawings sometimes depicted an elegant male hand, a whimsical tie pin or a stately umbrella, he chose to ignore the implications.

 

At that memorable Christmas party at Baker Street, when Greg said that he would be in Dorset the following day because he and his wife were back together, Sherlock tossed out absent-mindedly with his usual sledge-hammer bluntness, “No, she's sleeping with the PE teacher.” Greg felt his smile freeze and realised that shockingly, he wasn't all that surprised. While he prepared himself a drink and retuned to the party on autopilot, he admitted to himself how amazing it was what one's own mind could tell a person if one only wanted it to be true badly enough. Greg had simply been sick of being alone and thought that a second-rate relationship with his cheating wife was better than none. But back at home that evening, when he looked at his drawings of the previous weeks and months, he consciously understood what he had already known deep down. His trust in her was irrevocably shattered, and with it, every bit of respect he had ever held for her. The next morning, his wife drove to Dorset alone, and after the holidays, they set the divorce proceedings in motion. Once again, Greg turned to his pencils and paper for an outlet, and for a while his drawings turned dark and ugly again, like they had after his own parents' failed marriage. Just a he had back then, he burned every one of them and moved on with his life.

 

Then, Sherlock committed suicide. This time, Greg found solace in oil, turning his helpless self-loathing into violent shards of dirty greys and crimson splashes.

After the demise of the consulting detective, everyone expected his solve rate to drop significantly. And it did drop, but not as much as anyone, himself included, had thought. Again, Greg's intuition worked in his favour, and since it was a difficult time for him, he relied on his art, even though he still wouldn't have called it that, more than ever before. And though he worked more slowly without Sherlock's quicksilver deductions, he observed and did his work and solved most his cases in his own steady, reliable way. His cases were solid, and in the wake of Sherlock's alleged frauds, that was proven beyond a doubt. Greg couldn't really feel much joy at his official vindication; he simply continued with his work. And he continued to draw. There were no more violins or umbrellas in his paper margins, but details of crime scenes or witnesses cropped up with regularity and guided his inspiration. Two years after Sherlock's swan dive from the roof of St Barts, Greg had not only regained his professional reputation but surpassed it. It was a supreme irony of fate that with no wife around to push him to advance his career – and then complain loudly and often about his continuous absence until he found an excuse to return to the Yard – he was promoted to DCI. And still he drew.

 

A year later, Sherlock Holmes made a near magical return from death, although, it seemed, rumours of his demise had been exaggerated.

John was about to get married, and Sherlock managed to get himself shot, almost fatally. The whirlwind had returned to Greg's existence, and so had a calmer, more unobtrusive presence in the background, that of Mycroft Holmes. If Greg absent-mindedly drew umbrellas and details of unmarked black town cars again, well, he chose not to think about that too much.

 

The less was said about the whole mess at Musgrave Hall, the better where Greg was concerned. In the end, he'd had to sign an agreement under the Official Secrets Act, and he didn't even know a lot about Azkaban, or whatever that super-secret prison facility was called, and the deceptively delicate woman who had been helicoptered back there after a hypothermic John Watson had been cut free and taken out of that derelict well at Musgrave. The fact that her eyes were like Sherlock's only dawned on Greg when he had seen the two faces side by side on paper, drawn by his own hand.

And still he drew.

 

“Mycroft,” Sherlock had said to him. “Make sure he's looked after. He's not as strong as he thinks he is.” And Greg did.

It wasn't easy at first, because Mycroft Holmes had neither the wish nor the inclination to be “looked after”. In fact, he had pronounced those two words with such a wealth of subtle contempt, his expression so purely Mycroft that Greg felt his fingers itch for his pencil.

He did what he usually did, though, he persisted in his calm, steady way.

Looking after Mycroft Holmes included giving the man space as well as dragging him out of his self-imposed solitude at times. Greg knew all about self-imposed solitude and a workaholic's schedule, and he still had his extraordinary intuition. In the end, they both profited from their increased contact. For instance, Greg was pleased to see the Tate Modern again, where he literally hadn't been for years himself. He also managed to tease a wry but undeniable sense of humour out of the often so serious man when they met.

In the National Gallery, they regarded the Turner together that had featured in the James Bond Film _Skyfall_.

“Always makes me feel a little melancholy,” he said with a hint of mischief in his eyes. “Grand old warship, being ignominiously hauled away for scrap... The inevitability of time, don't you think? What do you see?”

Mycroft Holmes' usually so strict, thin lips lifted into a tiny smile of his own. “A bloody big ship,” he drily replied.

Greg laughed happily, surprised and delighted that his companion had not only recognised his quote but also answered in kind, and Mycroft's smile grew.

[A.N.: Directly quoted from the 2012 film _Skyfall_. Greg speaks Q's line and Mycroft James Bond's. The oil painting is _The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838_ by Joseph Mallord William Turner.]

 

These days, DCI Lestrade still draws, and he still has the habit of doing so during meetings, letting his hand give shape to subconscious thoughts and memories.

His intuition is still excellent, although right now he is for the second time in his life going though a phase where his drawings often have little to do with his work. The hands or eyes he draws are not of victims or witnesses, the objects that find their way on his paper rarely have to do with crime scenes or evidence. At home, he sometimes uses watercolours now; their delicate subtlety which has put him off years ago now fits his new favourite subject. At work, it's still pencils and Biros.

Sherlock sees that exquisitely shaded long nose or those long-fingered hands that are familiar to him, observes a sketched bottle of aged whisky or hideously expensive men's cologne that Greg Lestrade would never wear even as a single man with no family to support and an income of roughly £ 60.000 per year.

The DCI seems happy, though, more balanced and content than Sherlock has ever seen him before, and Mycroft, well, he does seem well taken care of. Because Sherlock has grown over the last few years and is not only a great man but a good one, he says nothing. He does roll his eyes, but that is basically obligatory and only causes Greg to smile, anyway.

Then he whirls away, John Watson in tow, because the game is on.

And Greg Lestrade draws and smiles.

 

~ Finis ~

 


End file.
